FA$T FOOD FRAUDSTER!
JACOBSON STOLE $24 MILLION BY RIGGING THE MCDONALD’S MONOPOLY GAME
We’ve all come across a cheater while playing board games, but no-one has gotten away with manipulation quite like Jerome ‘Jerry’ Jacobson.
Between 1989 and 2001, the scammer rigged the Mcdonald’s Monopoly game and pocketed
$24 million dollars.
His swindle ended when an anonymous tip-off to the FBI led to an investigation and the fast-food fraudster was finally busted. It’s since gone down as one of the greatest heists in history, even warranting the 2020 true-crime docuseries Mcmillion$.
The promotional game was designed to give people the chance to win prizes ranging from a free Macca’s meal to cars, boats and up to $1 million in cash!
When customers bought food, they received two coloured stickers that mirrored properties from the board game. Matching sets earned a prize.
However, it turned out, not a single ‘winner’ in the US was legitimate!
The sham – orchestrated by ex-cop Jacobson – was plain and simple.
Jacobson had worked with Dittler Brothers, which printed the pieces for the game. He then became head of security at Simon Marketing, the company that made the Monopoly game stickers.
Transporting the winning stickers to the packaging centres where they fixed them to cups, fries and burger boxes, Jacobson became savvy to the fact that he could make a huge profit by stealing the winning stickers, replacing them with others and selling the winning tickets to people who would then come forward as ‘genuine’ winners of the game.
For months, no-one suspected a thing – to his staff, Jacobson was meticulous. He even checked their shoes at the end of a shift to make sure none of the game stickers had gone missing.
His fraudulent enterprise started off on a small scale, with Jacobson ensuring prizes were won by his friends and relatives. He would give them winning stickers in exchange for a percentage of their
winnings in advance.
He sold pieces to his stepbrother, his butcher, who paid $2000 for a $10,000 piece, and his nephew, who earned a $200,000 piece after paying Jacobson $45,000.
To justify his actions, he said they were in response to executives rigging the game to ensure top prizes went to certain areas in the United States and not Canada.
In 1995, when Macca’s introduced heftier cash prizes including a $1 million jackpot, Jacobson’s hoax expanded. He used ‘middlemen’ to sell the winning pieces to associates such as drug dealers and ex-cons.
He also dealt with strip club owner and mob boss Gennaro Colombo to recruit other fake winners, including 39-year-old single mum Gloria Brown.
“Hopefully my son and I can live the kind of life
I dreamed of,” she told reporters in 1997 when she scooped the milliondollar jackpot.
It was later revealed Gloria had remortgaged her home to buy the ticket from Colombo and agreed to pay dividends every year.
Game ‘winners’ thought they were cheating at a game – not committing a federal crime – all the while Mcdonald’s customers were being denied the chance of fairly winning the big prizes.
‘Not a single winner in the United States was legitimate’
Come March 2000, the FBI were informed that a mystery man named ‘Uncle Jerry’ was falsifying the Mcdonald’s Monopoly game and investigation Operation Final Answer was launched to track winners and validate them. Phones were tapped and a suspect lured in to film a fake promo video. What unfolded was a network of 53 friends, family and associates – with Jacobson at the centre.
Mcdonald’s was oblivious to it all.
Standing trial in Jacksonville, Florida, on September 10, 2001, Jacobson pleaded guilty to three counts of mail fraud.
He served 37 months in federal prison and was ordered to pay US $12.5 million in restitution. Another 51 people were also convicted of mail fraud.
Today, Jacobson, in his seventies, is believed to be living with his seventh wife.